Web First

The first-ever Camps with Meaning (CWM) Song-a-thon went for eight hours, featuring 14 musical acts. Held at Canadian Mennonite University on April 16, 2016, the event raised $20,000 that will go toward building four new, all-season cabins at Camp Assiniboia, one of three camps that are part of CWM, the camping ministry of Mennonite Church Manitoba.

“I have a new appreciation for the phrase, ‘spreads like wildfire,’” says Patrick Drapeau. He and his wife, Rachel, live in Fort McMurray, the Alberta community that has faced raging wildfires for more than a week in early May 2016.

Marianne Jantzi is the author of Simple Pleasures: Stories from My Life as an Amish Mother, which has just been released by Herald Press as part of its Plainspoken series by Amish, Hutterite and plain Mennonite writers. In the book the author shares from the heart as she welcomes readers into her family’s daily life and Amish community.

Sergey Deynekin has dreams for the Chernobaevka Church in southern Ukraine. A bi-vocational pastor who works in the building trade, he developed architectural plans for a future church building after the congregation’s long-time rental location was no longer available and they moved into a vacant house. On Sundays, they crowd into two rooms with a pulpit placed near the doorway.

The board of governors of Conrad Grebel University College announced that president Susan Schultz Huxman has accepted the call to become the president of Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in Harrisonburg, Va.

Mennonites are responding to the recent earthquakes in Ecuador, where members of multiple Mennonite congregations are among 100,000 people affected by the disaster. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck the Pacific coast of northern Ecuador on April 16, 2016, followed by a second earthquake on April 20. At least 570 people have been killed and more than 7,000 injured or missing.

Masum Khandakar is a Bangladeshi rice farmer with a craggy face and a jutting white beard that flares as wide as the wings of his collared shirt. His voice goes high when his emotions overwhelm him. That is what happened one day in late December when he stood up during a community meeting inside a dimly lit schoolhouse in the town of Kotalipara and described what Koinonia had done for him.

When Henry and Hilda Schulz of Sanford, Man., were still farming, one of the crops they grew was barley.

As friends at their church—Sargent Avenue Mennonite in Winnipeg—learned this, they asked them for barley seed to make Easter centrepieces, as a way to bring a little spring and new life into their homes.

Marketed “for twenty- and thirty-somethings who wish they could do camp again,” Pastors in Exile (PiE) and Silver Lake Mennonite Camp near Sauble Beach, Ont., ran what they called “Winter Camp for Grown-ups” from March 4 to 6, 2016.

From plain coats to lace-covered wedding dresses, Amanda Bartel, a history major from Iowa City, Iowa, is cataloging Bluffton University’s historic clothing collection to learn more about what it means to dress like a Mennonite. She explained the cataloging process for students, faculty, staff and community members on March 1, 2016, at Bluffton University.

Conrad Grebel University College hosted Sir James MacMillan as the 2016 Rodney and Lorna Sawatsky Visiting Scholar. The Scottish composer and conductor, best known for his sacred choral works, gave his Sawatsky Lecture address, “The spiritual in music,” on March 1, 2016.

Because I grew up in the Mennonite tradition, conscientious objection is not a foreign concept to me. I was raised to value peace over violence and to treat every human life as sacred and precious. These values have stayed with me throughout my life.

Steve Heinrichs is passionate about healing broken relationships between indigenous and settler peoples. As Mennonite Church Canada’s director of indigenous relations, he is committed to responding positively to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Call to Action No.

The greeting you get when visiting Yhya Al Kurdi’s apartment is full of excitement. Before you actually reach the door, Al Kurdi has opened it and stands at the end of the long corridor, waiting as you walk the rest of the way. Though he doesn’t know much English yet, he’ll give an enthusiastic, “Hello, hello, hello!” as he ushers you inside.

Dorine Russell sits in a comfortable armchair in her new room at Prairie Meadow Place, a cup of coffee by her side. “This is a wonderful place,” she says. “I love it here.” Russell moved to Rosthern, Sask., from Ontario a year ago to be near her daughter, who lives in Waldheim.

Karla Fehr, a member of Blumenort Mennonite Church in Gretna, Man., was part of a food study tour group organized by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. They travelled to Nicaragua for about two weeks earlier this year to learn about the link between global hunger and small-scale farmers.

“We see them, but we do not know them.” That was an observation a Mexican friend made to Rebecca Janzen, about the Low German speaking Mennonites in Mexico. Recently Janzen was the 2016 C. Henry Smith Peace Lecturer at Bluffton University, speaking on the topic “Small Signs of Pluralism in Mexico: Identification Cards and Other Images of the Low German Mennonites.”

Jono Cullar of Waterloo, Ont., was honoured with a 20 under 35 award from Mennonite Economic Development Associates late last year for exemplifying “MEDA values: faith, service and an entrepreneurial spirit.”